Become a BETTER Bird Photographer & Find those ELUSIVE Birds! The Bird Photography Show EP. 6

[Music] [Music] hi guys and welcome back to the bird photography show with glenn bartley hello and me jan wagner do you ever wonder how glenn and i are seemingly able to take amazing bird images in the field every time we go out and when you go outside yourself into the bush you might not get any shots at all let me tell you there's a lot that goes in to two professionals consistently creating high quality images in the field so today we want to share our top tips with you how you can also go out there and take amazing bird images and a consistent basis all right well let's get right into it tip number one which might seem obvious but then again sometimes those things that seem obvious are really not that obvious you absolutely have to get to know your birds you have to get to understand their behavior of course it's and i'm not talking about just being able to see a burden identified you need to understand them how they live their lives all these things basically what i'm trying to say is in order to be a really good bird photographer you also have to be a really good bird watcher or good birder because if you don't know what you're seeing in the field or what you're hearing in the field it's very hard to actually make a plan to get closer to the bird for instance because if you see something in the tree and you know that bird might always come down and feed on these certain flowers that are right in front of you you know you might be able to wait here and then the word will come down naturally but if you just don't know what you're looking at there's no way you can make a plan to actually get that bird so it's important that you learn about birds and what's the best way to learn about woods how have you learned about birds and bird calls well first of all let's get started with just getting a good field guide whether that's on your smartphone or an actual you know traditional field guide that's a must hopefully you've already got that if you want to be a bird photographer second thing is definitely going to also want to have a decent pair of binoculars you know i am fortunate enough to have some beautiful swarovski binoculars and i enjoy using them whether i'm out birding or whether i'm in the field taking pictures a lot of times sometimes i go out without my camera and try to scout locations and things like that in order to then later be able to get the shots you know if you're someone who wants to take great bird photos presumably you're someone who loves being out in nature and observing birds so don't separate those two things be a good birder learn about birds and spend lots of time in the field tip number one tip number two you have to be looking for the birds in the right spots because otherwise you spend a lot of your time looking for birds and they might not even be there and you're just wasting all your time yeah i mean i couldn't agree more in fact earlier this spring i filmed a little video showing exactly this so let's take a look out from the wilds of victoria bc all right guys today's mission is the common yellow throat a beautiful little warbler and really what i want to talk about today is that sometimes in bird photography it's all about finding the right spot this is the ideal spot to photograph this species there's all these vegetation behind me and there's these little flowering seed pods sticking up or flat old flowers and the yellow throats are landing on them and it's just perfect because i have this huge runway you can see behind me here i can walk all along this area and there's territories of these birds like there's probably a dozen of them in here so all i have to do is walk along and hope that they pop up on the pod well that was a pretty cool little video with some great photos glenn but how did you actually find that initial spot you kind of run us through what made that spot good but how do you find your spots how do our viewers can find spots for themselves yeah that's a critical question we have these amazing resources now of course we've already talked about books and things like that but there's an incredible resource available for finding birds and locating spots it's this fantastic website called ebird ebird i use it all the time whether i'm in canada or i'm down in south america it's just incredible resource you can just type in a species you're looking for and it'll show you where everyone's recorded that species before they'll be blue pins for just general observations and the red pins are ones that have happened very recently so if you're looking for a particular species and you see like tons of pins in this one particular park and a bunch of red ones clearly that's a great place to go looking if you were thinking about going to some other park and you look and there's no pins you're going to waste a lot of time so ebird is amazing so there's a website called cloud birders and cloud birders is a great website it has like a ton of trip reports that people have posted from their past trips and you can read through them and really pull out a ton of information about you know what birds to look for where to stay how far it is between places all kinds of factual and really logistically important information when you're planning a photo shoot so those are two of my tips for finding the birds how about you jan they're very good tips and they definitely work if you want to just find the areas where the birds are in what i find quite useful for instance is facebook birder groups it's not always the nicest sort of tone in these groups but people usually post a lot of pictures from different areas and i find it very helpful to see potential spots and you get a better idea of how the birds are like in that certain area on ebert you see they are in this area but you don't really have that sort of on the ground information yeah because a lot of the birders a lot of people there are birders so the bird may have been just up on the top of the tree and it was 50 of them so the data could be skewed sometimes these images are not the greatest but what i try to do is i just look for potential basically if i can see they had a cool parrot coming into their veranda at this campground i know if i go to this campground there's probably a good chance that i will somehow be able to set up a nice perch put a bit of bird seed out for instance get some cool shots myself so that's one resource that i really like to use and i have hundreds and hundreds of screenshots that i've taken over the years of potential spots and i don't always instantly go to those spots but if i know i go to a certain area i go through my screenshots i'm like oh yeah there was this person that had these awesome birds coming in so i might contact them or visit that spot nice now i don't know if this has ever happened to you sometimes you're at the right spot the birds are there but they're like impossible to get close to or impossible to photograph and you're just wondering like what is up with this species how are people getting these shots and then you stumble upon the magic spot where the bird is like super tame and you realize all of a sudden so for example when i used to live back in ontario i remember seeing these beautiful wood ducks in the field like in these little rivers or around and they wouldn't let you get within like 100 meters of them and then i move out here where i live now and there's a golf course with a pond and they're like incredibly tame you can take head shots of them so in this case just finding the right spot was key has that ever happened to you yen it really happens all the time and i always say there's no point in wasting your time on a bird that just seems to be impossible to get in your area when you can actually find areas where they're essentially really easy because you may have spent years trying to get a wood duck shot in ontario without ever getting any shot and then you just go to vancouver and within two days you get more shots than you would have gotten in the last two years tip number three which is get to know your equipment extremely well this is so important you know when you have this tool and as digital cameras get more and more sort of complicated and and whatnot you really have to get to know your camera obviously you want to start with like just reading the manual and understanding the basic functionality but truly the goal i would say is to be able to like literally if someone blindfolded you you could still change the settings on your camera but you really need to know where your buttons are and where things are because in the field things happen quick and if you're fumbling around through menus or looking for settings you probably missed the shot i totally agree and there's probably two things that you really need to master the first thing is what we talked about last week in our birds in flight video that you have to be able to master the eye lens coordination where you can easily find a boot in your viewfinder if you can't do that you will never get any bird shots and secondly i totally agree and i don't even think you were exaggerating with the blindfolding aspect i think someone woke you up in the middle of the night and say put this in this setting in your camera you should be able to just do it like that essentially because that's what happens in the field especially if you're shooting in manual mode for instance and it's fast action happening but then a cloud comes in front of the sun you should be able to just know i need to now have a slower shutter speed so just do like two or three clicks on the wheel and that gets me down one spot so my image will be brighter or the same could happen it's cloudy and then suddenly the sun comes out so i know i probably need two or three stops of more shutter speed so quickly turn the wheel on the back for me that's how i set it up on the back of the camera and without even looking at any settings i can still keep my exposure right and that actually has become a lot easier as well with the electronic viewfinders now because you can actually see your exposure in the viewfinder yeah i mean the mirrorless has made it a lot easier where you don't have to you know be really paying attention to the light with that histogram in the viewfinder it's it's an incredible new tool another thing that might be worth um talking about before we move on from this tip is you know the camera comes to you out of the box and some things are set up okay but sometimes you can customize buttons either to a more logical way or to just a way that makes more sense to you for changing your settings in a quick way so it's really worth taking the time to set up your camera and the buttons to be ideal for the style of shooting that you do 100 i think we both made ebooks and videos about that as well because for instance on my r5 none of the buttons are the same way they came out of the box i actually found the camera not that great to use out of the box but then setting it up with like double back button focus for instance completely changed the game for me and it became a really really good camera so customizing your camera is a very important key all right guys tip four is really important for bird photography and that is that you have to be patient you have to have perseverance and you have to have realistic expectations of your success i know we said at the beginning that you know every time we go out we get great shots that's a lie i don't know why you said that yen you were lying it's not always like that sometimes you go out and you get nothing this spring i was shooting a bunch a lot of days i went out and i came home empty-handed and that's just part of being a bird photographer but you still always learn something when you're out there and you're sort of always making these mental notes about what maybe wasn't the right conditions or whatever so be patient and stick to it and it will eventually pay off totally and to my defense i said we seemingly make it look easy so it's not always easy in the field and we totally admit that often we don't get any shots at all or we work on a project for many many years for instance there were these purple crowned lorikeets and i found a nest that was really low in a big tree almost at eye level right so it's like a fantastic opportunity to get some shots but the shot i really wanted was all the babies sticking the head out of the hollow and then the two parents sitting on the side and the first year when i first found it there was some babies there but i never got the shot that i wanted and then every year after that i went back to the same place but something was never right sometimes they only had one baby and then it didn't look right sometimes the parents would have really sort of ratty plumage from just being worn down other times it was raining or when the babies came out it was just really bright sunny and then i couldn't shoot because there was all these shadows on the nest and it just wouldn't look right and then i think the first time i went there was 2010 and i got the shot that i wanted in 2019 so it's been nine years going back to the same spot over and over trying to get that shot and i think that's a good example where if you persist and you know it's a good spot because i knew i could get the image there i just had to be there at the right time and in the end i got it so i think that combines a few of our points that you have to know the right spot and if we know it's a good spot we're willing to spend the time there and then if you spend the time there you will also get the shots that you want in the end hopefully hopefully yeah it doesn't always work out but definitely uh that's a great example so what about you guys are there birds that you might call your nemesis bird ones that have given you a really hard time or maybe one that was giving you a hard time and you finally succeeded if that's the case let us know what's your nemesis bird whether you conquered it or not let us know tip number five and i think that's quite an important one that you develop your own style or you at least know what you're looking for when you're out in the field i mean personally i'm quite well known for my style though the very clean background a nice perch and then just the bird on the perch so quite minimalistic in a way and i'm not saying you have to copy my work or glenn's work or anybody else's work i think it's just important that you actually think about what you're doing in the field think about what you want to achieve because you work the same way don't you glenn yeah i mean i totally agree it's not it's not important that you you have like oh your signature style of images that's not going to work for everyone but what is critical is that when you go out into the field you have some idea of what you're trying to create you know whether that's an image with a super clean background or whether that's you know more of a habitat shot or the bird small in the frame or you know it's totally up to you it's whatever you enjoy what do you love about bird photography and what are the types of images that you want to create that's what's critical and you need to have that in your mind because all of a sudden when things are happening in the field and the bird is presenting itself you want to have a clear image of what you're trying to create if you don't even know what you're trying to create it's exponentially harder to actually create it so definitely want to have a good idea of what you're after so let's take glenn and i for instance we're using the same camera same lens and use a lot of the same techniques as you've seen over the last few weeks but it doesn't mean that our final images look the same in fact they can be quite different can't they totally like so a few years ago i was down in australia and jan and i did some shooting together and you know if you were to look at the images that we took even though we were standing right next to each other our final product our final edited product isn't going to look exactly the same we both had a slightly different take on the scene and we both certainly edited the images different which is a great segue yan into tip number six which is you have to get good in the digital darkroom you have to process your images it is so important you could take you know be doing everything right out in the field and if you just bring your images home and don't pay attention to your post processing you're not going to wind up with a great final product no would you agree with me if i say there is no such thing as straight out of camera if you're shooting with raw files like your eyes see something completely different than what the camera sensor sees so even if you just wanted to keep it all natural whatever you want to call it you would still have to do some tweaking some editing and even in the editing process there are a lot of different camera profiles that you can pick that severely change the look of out of your images so you are inevitably doing some sort of editing and if you have to do it anyways you might as well do it well i think the reality is is that maybe there was an era in early and digital photography when people were like oh photoshop is cheating and and you know what that actually meant was that person didn't want to learn how to do post-processing they didn't want to put the time in to learn how to edit their images to make them look nice nowadays there's just no way around it you have to process your images and really probably what stands in people's way is that you know photoshop can be quite an intimidating program you open that program it's like where do i even get started there's so many buttons and tools and everything and if you go and buy some random giant 700 page manual it's the same problem you don't even know what you need to know from this giant book so you know both yan and i have come up with instructional guides specifically for bird photographers so that you can learn just what you need to know in an efficient way and that you can take your editing skills to a completely different level so you know those are well worth doing if you're struggling in the digital darkroom you'll save a ton of time both from learning in that way and also because you're be so much more efficient based on how we teach you exactly so make sure to check them out in the description and i think it's all about not wasting any time on the computer we don't want to edit or over edit our images we just want to have a good efficient workflow that gets us to where we want to be and that comes back to the style as well because if you know what you want to achieve in the field you also can easily edit your images because you already have an idea in your mind what you want your final image to look like yeah that's a great point that's like it's basically the same thing in the field like i was saying earlier you see a bird it lands on a branch and you immediately know what you want to do the same thing happens at your computer you open a file you see the picture and immediately your mind is kind of making a plan like okay i might like lighten up the background i might add some saturation i might remove that little twig but like the more practice you get and the more experience you get that plan just immediately comes to you whereas when you're new if you're not really sure what you're trying to do you might not really know what to do and also as your skills develop like when you look at a photo that might be quite problematic you're like okay this might take me a bit but i could fix this whereas when you're starting out you're like that's garbage so as your skills improve you can do more with your images and still make it look wonderful and you can certainly save some images absolutely and editing without a plan is really where you get frustrated and things can fall apart because if you don't know where you want to be how do you get to that point you're just pulling sliders lifting curves but you don't really know what's happening where you're going and you might never be happy so having a plan having that vision and also acquiring the knowledge necessary to edit the images is what's key here and don't be shy just edit them it's not faking it's just making the most out of the opportunity that you have because while you're happy with the dull image if you can have like an amazing looking image yeah i mean at the end of the day that's to me that's always the most important thing you've had this moment you've seen this spectacular beautiful bird you've done a good job with your camera and you've gotten a pretty good raw file the final piece of the puzzle is to polish it up and make it shine and make people when they look at that photo say wow that's that's the goal right so 100 well guys we hope you've enjoyed this episode um you know from time to time we're going to do this style of episode where we try to address different questions and different ideas about how to hopefully help you become a better bird photographer so if you have suggestions things you've been wondering about things you've always wanted to know feel free to drop them down in the comments and we'll try to address those in a future episode and like always please make sure to like and share this video with your friends leave us a comment and make sure to also subscribe to the channel and we will see you in one of our next episodes very soon bye guys see you next time guys [Music]

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 12,007

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Id: AbO_FjjJu5o

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021